Cracker

The humble cracker.

Hatch Type	Minimum Count	Maximum Count	Placement
Energy Input	1	2	Any casing
Energy Output	N/A	N/A	N/A
Fluid Input	1	Unlimited	Any casing
Fluid Output	1	Unlimited	Any casing
Item Input	N/A	N/A	N/A
Item Output	N/A	N/A	N/A
Muffler	1	1	Any casing

The Cracker is a multiblock designed for the cracking of long-chain hydrocarbons into smaller hydrocarbons, either using steam or hydrogen.

Behaviour

The Cracker takes in the fluid to be cracked in one hatch, and steam or hydrogen in the other hatch, and produces the cracked fluid output that can be piped to a distillery or a distillation tower. The Cracker always requires a circuit, which can be set in the virtual circuit slot of one of the input hatches. This circuit controls if the output fluid is lightly or severely cracked.

The Cracker uses coil blocks; every coil tier above Cupronickel uses 10% less energy. As you need ferrochroluminium coils to make the ferrochrome required for the casings, you should always start with ferrochroluminium coils to save a small amount of energy.

The Cracker also requires a muffler hatch; this hatch can be anywhere on the body of the cracker.

Sharing Pattern

An example of tiling two Crackers on top of each other.

Due to the space available on the middle (unshared) row of a Cracker multiblock, it can be infinitely stacked vertically. Each one should have its own energy hatch and output hatch, but the two input hatches can be shared between groups of two Crackers.